We The People 2.0

Have you ever used a public service that understood your needs? We all have horror stories of waiting in seemingly endless lines at the DMV or hunting forever to find the information we need on poorly designed city websites. Who is making sure that government uses effective design and technology to meet the needs of citizens in the 21st century?

Introducing Code for America

Code for America is a brand new non-profit that is taking on this challenge. And part of the challenge is understanding the target users of the technology. To help in that effort, Suzy Thompson and I taught a day-long workshop on Research for UX Design to the fellows at Code for America.

Code for America signage at their offices in San Francisco, autographed by the 2011 fellows

Code for America helps local city governments leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory. Built on a model similar to Teach for America, CfA encourages developers and designers to apply for a year-long fellowship, during which they will create open-source technology solutions for city governments. Out of over 300 applicants, CfA chose 20 fellows for their inaugural year, from a wide variety of backgrounds including Web 2.0 startup entrepreneurs, developers for local city governments and school districts, open source contributors, a researcher for the New York Times, a digital journalist, an intellectual property lawyer/programmer, and a museum exhibit designer.

Code for America 2011 fellows (image used by permission from Code for America)

Code for America Institute

The fellows are spending the month of January in San Francisco at the Code for America Institute, learning from guest speakers about a wide variety of topics, including treating government as a platform (Tim O’Reilly), building local communities (Danielle Morrill), being a change agent and nurturing social network communities (Caterina Fake), and taking an entrepreneurial view of their city projects (Eric Ries).

Host City Projects

Each of the fellows is assigned to one of four city teams, each with a target project:

Civic Commons: a platform for municipalities to share custom-built technology solutions, so cities can leverage their development investments and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The fellows will spend the month of February in their host cities, learning about the IT infrastructure and interviewing city stakeholders and users of their system. They will return to San Francisco in March to design and develop the open-source applications. They will present and hand-off the applications to their host cities in the fall.

Cooper Training

Because Cooper has extensive experience connecting user research to product design, Code for America asked us to come in and present a one-day workshop. From our courses on interaction design and design communication, we carved out a day’s worth of materials on finding stakeholders and users, preparing an interview instrument, conducting interviews, debriefing interviews, and synthesizing and presenting research findings. We also gave them a look-ahead to personas, scenarios, and framework design.

The fellows got a chance to plan an interview instrument and conduct a 45-minute interview with members of the CfA staff. Conducting good ethnographic interviews takes practice — I think the fellows came out of our workshop with a sense of confidence in talking to their city stakeholders and application users in February. I look forward to hearing about what they learn about their users, and to helping them create personas and scenarios from their findings. And I can’t wait to see the amazing applications that result from their work.

Great Government Research and Design

A question to our readers: Where have you seen user experience design principles applied to government applications or services, to achieve an amazing outcome? At Cooper, we’re currently working on a project with CalSTRS (California State Teachers’ Retirement System), and in the past have done pro bono work with the SF Department of Health. I have also read about fellow Cooperista Renna Al-Yassini’s service design work for the Roudha Center in Qatar. What user experience design work in the government or social service sectors has impressed or inspired you?

Jim Dibble

Jim Dibble is an Associate Director at Cooper Professional Education.

Find out how Cooper Professional Education can help your organization become more creative, human-centered, and impactful on our corporate training page.

Learn more

Subscribe to our mailing list and stay up to date on our latest thought leadership and learning opportunities.

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. If you continue to click on this page, you accept the use of cookies. Read more about our Cookie Policy here and our Privacy Policy here.Got it!